Office productivity apps analysis

Raju posted about an InfoWorld analysis of alternatives to MS office. What makes the analysis interesting is that for the first time (that I’ve seen) cloud based and Open Source products have been evaluated side by side.

As is often the case with these sorts of analyses, it’s what is left unsaid that is arguably more important than what is said.

Some things I’d like mentioned or assessed to make a comparison more meaningful;

An analysis of the benefits to be gained from the cloud based nature of two of the offerings (ability to mine web data etc)

The release cycle of cloud based vs Open Source software

A comparison of all four offerings in relation to MS Office itself

The InfoWorld analysis looked at the main productivity (documents, spreadsheet and presentation) – it didn’t look at associated offerings from the same vendors (Zoho business, Google’s other offerings etc). As Raju pointed out in his post, if you look where the cloud based apps have come from in only a couple of years, it’s plain to see that their development velocity is far higher than the installed competitors – extrapolate that fact out for another few years and we’re sure to see cloud based apps streak ahead of the competitors – the one question that remains is what is Microsoft’s strategy around S+S for MS Office?

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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Very good point, Ben. I think another article published the same day @ Computerworld makes that point better, essentially concluding that Web-Office services are no longer just MS alternatives, but they start offering benefits that their PC-based counterparts could not have.

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Ben Kepes is a business leader, a technology evangelist, an entrepreneur, and a commentator. Ben covers the convergence of business and technology.